Your Favorite Music for Spinning – It's All Good
Take a spin class at Mcycle cycling studio and you are guaranteed to hear some great music during your ride. We believe music is particularly important to what we do. In fact, our instructors choose their music to coincide with their workouts, thus increasing performance and efficiency. It turns out our riders love it too!
So what's your favorite music for spinning? We all have our favorite songs. Riders also have different preferences in terms of the style of music they enjoy. Here's the thing: it's all good. Whatever music motivates you to be at your best is appropriate for your workout.
We thought you'd like to know little bit more about why music is so often incorporated in spinning classes. There is actually science behind it. Believe it or not, that science goes back more than one hundred years.
Cyclists Riding Faster
Music has been known to stimulate people for hundreds of years. As just one example, soldiers have been learning to march to music for centuries because they tend to go further and faster when music is playing. They also tend to finish their marches less fatigued.
The practice was part of the motivation behind a study done by researcher Leonard Ayres way back in 1910. Ayers attended the six-day bicycle race in New York's Madison Square Garden that year. Armed with a stopwatch, he recorded lap times during the entire six days of the event – both when the riders rode in silence and when they rode with a brass band playing in the background.
Ayres recorded an average lap time of 3:21 per mile during silent periods. That time fell to 3:04 when the music played. Ayers concluded that the music, for whatever reason, was motivating the cyclists to ride harder and faster. His research birthed decades of scientific study attempting to explain how music affects human psychology.
Taking the Mind Off Exercise
One of the more recent studies in the field of music and psychology was published in 2009. It was conducted by researchers at Liverpool John Moores University (UK). After studying a group of students in a laboratory-controlled environment, researchers concluded that music's biggest benefit to enhancing exercise is its ability to be a distraction.
In other words, exercising in silence encourages the mind to focus on the exercise itself. Such a focus can lead a person to be overly sensitive to the discomfort, fatigue, and pain of working out. Being so highly attuned to the negative aspects of rigorous exercise can result in a person not working as hard or as long.
On the other hand, music captures the mind and the attention. It takes a person's mind off the exercise, thereby limiting the perception of discomfort. This naturally motivates the individual to work harder and longer.
Different Aspects of Music
It is interesting to note that the British researchers looked at several different aspects of music and its effect on indoor cycling. They looked at tempo, duration, and even music style. They observed different results based on the goals for each type of music chosen.
In the end, they concluded that music genre was less important than they had assumed. Tempo and duration are both important, but their effects on performance and efficiency vary.
The science tells us that indoor cycling is made better with music. Our instructors put a lot of work into music selections whenever they devise a new routine. We think it shows. Our spinning classes are a favorite in Salt Lake City because we work so hard to provide the optimal experience – music and all.